


the final frontier

by mitzvahmelting



Series: dino love [1]
Category: Jurassic Park Original Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of trauma, Anxiety, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Permanent Injury, Polyamory Negotiations, Sharing a Bed, post-jurassic park 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 22:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15592674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzvahmelting/pseuds/mitzvahmelting
Summary: A month after escaping Isla Nublar, Ellie and Alan receive a late night phone call from Ian Malcolm. They decide to drop everything to go take care of him.Kind of a rambly, post-movie h/c and ot3 get-together fic.





	the final frontier

**Author's Note:**

> oy vey, i don't know. 
> 
> i was like "hey i want to write dinOT3 smut" but i couldn't seem to do that without getting caught in the weeds of "well, how did they get together?" 
> 
> so this is my "how did they get together" fic, and if i do write smut, i'll use this as a jumping off point. no promises XD
> 
> title comes from the [opening theme song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4Gg3fhR-U) from the sitcom _Mad About You_ because i'm weeeeak i love that show

“He’s asleep,” says Alan, softly shutting the door of the bedroom. “Finally.” He enters the kitchen to stand beside Ellie, who has taken it upon herself to begin working through the stacks of dishes in the sink. “Why are you doing that?” he asks.

“I just want to be helpful. I don’t mind doing it.” She sets another ceramic plate on the drying rack. “You could help.” 

Alan rolls his eyes, and as he’s picking up the dish towel he mutters, “Who needs kids, when you’ve got a grown man to take care of?” 

“ _ Alan. _ ”

In the month since Isla Nublar, they’ve more-or-less kept in touch with Dr. Malcolm and Lex and Tim through email, sharing with each other the burden of readjusting to “real life” with the spectre of living dinosaurs looming over their shoulders. For Alan and Ellie the adjustment was difficult, but manageable, navigating the world and making sense of the aftermath while leaning on each other.

Then last night, at three in the morning, a phone call from Dr. Malcolm. Alan had woken first, answered after the second ring. Forced, then, to listen to Ian’s half-coherent, terrified babble. It had felt like he was on that park ride, again.  _ I didn’t say you were scared. _

It’s only a seven hour drive from home in San Diego to Ian’s San Francisco apartment. It’s only an hour and a half, if you take the direct flight, but halfway through booking it, Alan looked at Ellie and asked, “Is this crazy?” 

She smiled, and with a groggy voice she said, “Yeah, honey, it’s a little crazy.”

So Alan hung up the phone with the airline, and took a breath. The panic subsided, and they packed their bags calmly, and they drove.

Now it’s early afternoon, and they’re in Dr. Malcolm’s apartment, and they’ve put him to bed, and they’re doing his dishes.

“Sixty hours, give or take,” says Ellie, as she passes Alan a glass to dry. “While you were calling his office, I asked him when he last slept, and he said ‘Tuesday.’ Can you believe that? Tuesday.”

Alan takes another look around the apartment. It looks much neater than it has any right to. The only evidence of Ian’s troubles is the stack of dishes, the clutter of books left open on the coffee tables and countertops, the rolling office chair left standing by the television. Other than those things… there is no trash, there aren’t any socks in strange places. The man’s shoes are all neatly ordered on the shoe rack. The television remote lays parallel to the edge of the side-table. If Alan hadn’t slept in sixty hours, his living space would look so much worse than this.

“Does he seem taller than you remember?” he asks Ellie. 

She shakes her head. “Shorter, with the crutches. Why? Does he seem taller to you?”

“Maybe I never noticed it before. Or after spending that day in the hospital, maybe I forgot.”

Ellie hands him the last dish, and she shuts off the sink, drying her hands on a spare towel. “I called Fran, by the way.”

“What did you say?”

“Family emergency. They’ll cover for us at the conference this weekend - but if she pages you, don’t be surprised when she asks about your poor, ailing mother.” Ellie then takes two steps towards the door of the bedroom, and she stands there, hesitating. “I shouldn’t check on him,” she says, mostly to herself, “it’d wake him up.”

There hadn’t been a question about coming here. Ellie’s a caring person by nature, so it’s no surprise she was ready to make the trip. Alan, well… he wouldn’t have guessed that listening to Ian’s voice over the phone would get him so worked up. It kind of makes him uncomfortable to think about. But Ellie, she keeps giving him that smile. Like they’re on the same wavelength. 

“You could turn on the television,” Alan suggests helplessly. “Or we could… I think I saw the guest bedroom, downstairs. We could bring the bags there.”

Maybe something in his voice makes Ellie turn around. She finds the back of the couch, and she sort of leans against it, fixing Alan with a look. That look she gives him when she’s waiting for him to say what’s on his mind. 

He puts down the dish towel. “Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird to invite ourselves into another man’s house?”

She laughs. “I’ve been following your lead since this morning, Al.” 

“We barely know the guy.”

“But you’re really worried about him,” she points out.

“ _ Yes, _ ” Alan huffs out, scratching the back of his neck. “Because,  _ God,  _ you and I, we have each other. And Lex and Tim, they have each other, they’ll be alright. But he… and he’s the one with the leg.” He looks around, searchingly. “Where’s his, you know. Where’s his wife? Where are his kids?” 

Ellie goes over to the phone, on the desk next to the computer monitor. She leafs through the address book that Alan had used to call Malcolm’s office. “Well,” she says, “one has an L.A. area code. Oh, here you go - Chaim Weizmann Community Day School.”

“Not helpful.”

She shuts the book and sighs. “Are you really asking where they are, or are you asking why we’re here?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “The latter.”

He shuts his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose, and then Ellie is in front of him, and her arms wrap around his neck. A peck of her lips against his, and some of the tension drains from him. “Because,” she says, “he asked for us.”

 

That evening, when they’re halfway through a large pizza and a marathon of  _ Mad About You  _ re-runs, the bedroom door opens. Ellie leans over the back of the couch to say fondly, “Hello there, Sleeping Beauty.”

For a moment, Ian pauses just outside the door, leaning heavily on his crutches and not yet wearing his glasses. A black silk robe loosely protects his modesty, but leaves uncovered the long red surgery scar on the outside of his knee. He rubs his face. “Beauty?” he mumbles, “That’s, uh, that’s a new one.”

Alan stands to bring him his glasses, which had been abandoned earlier on the kitchen counter during the process of corralling the man into bed. Ian rubs the lenses on the tie of his robe - this close, his body radiates sleep-warmth and the musk of his sweat. “Come sit down,” Alan suggests.

With his glasses on, Ian seems to get stuck staring dumbly at Alan’s face. Alan flushes, and he looks searchingly at Ellie. “He wants the chair,” she says, and she goes to fetch the office chair from its awkward station by the TV, rolling it towards them so Ian can carefully lower himself into it. The little gasp of pain makes Ellie’s gaze harden - Alan wonders if this reminds her of the raptors. In a bit of a rush she explains, “We found the menus in the kitchen and we ordered pizza, do you want some? Honey, when’s the last time you ate?”

Alan takes away the crutches to lean them against the wall, and Ian rubs his face more to clear the grogginess. “Don’t… I’ve, I’ve been eating. Can’t take the pain, pain medication on an empty stomach, would destroy your liver. Um. How long have you two been here?”

They share a look over Ian’s head, and Ellie makes a placatory gesture to Alan. He takes a deep breath. She says, “We got in this afternoon. You called us last night, do you remember?”

“Oh. I was hoping that was… I was hoping I’d dreamt that. You didn’t have to - um,” Ian licks his lips, and he looks around the room with a furrowed brow, scanning the countertops. He kicks off with his good leg to roll towards the kitchen. “Did you want something to drink? I have, um, plastic cups in the…”

He notices the empty sink. 

Alan is struck again by those thoughts of _if it were me._ _If it were me, and these near-strangers had come into my home and done my dishes._ His heart breaks, watching the shame color Ian’s face. The embarrassment. Ian smiles to cover it, and he coughs out, “You didn’t, uh, you didn’t have to do that.”

“Ian,” says Ellie. It may be the first time she’s called him that out loud. “Come eat.” 

There is no room for argument in her tone. “Oh,” says Ian, eventually. “Okay.” 

 

When there’s finally a slice of pizza in Ian’s lap, Alan can breathe again. He collapses heavily on the couch next to Ellie, muting the TV so they can better keep track of the chaotician’s rambling, mumbled speech. “There’s a, um, um, a guest bedroom downstairs. And a bathroom. When I got the house, I knew I needed space for, you know, the, um, the kids visiting.” A bite of his pizza, and he’s still speaking as he chews. “There might not be um, sheets, on the bed, they’re in the linen closet by the front door, it’s, um… I didn’t really think you’d come.”

There’s a bit of a height discrepancy between the low sofa and the high office chair, but Ellie reaches out to place a hand on Ian’s wrist all the same. “Of course we’d come,” she says, “We’re worried about you. We almost - Alan almost booked a flight.”

Ian’s gaze is hooked on Ellie’s hand on his arm. “I’m really sorry about that,” he says. “You know, you know, they say that after twenty-four hours without sleep, you may as well be drunk. If I’d… been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have, uh. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“It’s alright,” Alan says. He’s leaning back on the couch with an arm behind Ellie, but he’s watching Ian closely. “We’re friends,” he adds.

“ _ Friends, _ ” Ian chokes out a laugh, “You don’t want to be friends with me, Dr. Grant, you’ll never get any uhhh…. sleep…” He frowns, suddenly. “What day is it?”

“Friday,” says Ellie.

“Tomorrow’s the 17th?”

Alan sits forward. “Yes?”

Ian’s face cracks into despair, “Oh, no, no, no, you’ve got to drive back.”

“Why’s that?” Alan asks.

“Dr. Sattler, your paper on cenozoic den, _ dendrology. _ ”

She grins. “You kept up with my papers?” 

He scoffs. “Of course I - you’re an expert in a field that has suddenly become crucially relevant to survival in our modern world.” 

“And what about me?” Alan teases.

Ian narrows his eyes. “With all due respect, Dr. Grant, you haven’t published anything this year.” 

“Eat your pizza.” 

He does, for a moment. He takes another bite and he chews, staring at them. His foot is tapping against the floor. “You have to go to that conference,” he says.

Ellie leans back against Alan’s arm. “There will be other conferences,” she says.

“Dr. Sattler-”

“And for God’s sake, call me Ellie, please.”  She covers her face with both hands, and she takes a deep breath.

Alan wants to kiss her. And he agrees… he agrees with her assessment of the situation. There’s something unspoken, tethering them here, especially now that they’ve seen Ian, now that they’ve seen… how much he needs them.

The man, Dr. Malcolm, was so  _ annoying  _ on Isla Nublar. But even so, from the beginning he was charming, friendly, trying his best to keep things light, keep the attention on him so that they wouldn’t worry about the helicopter or the ride safety or the… the apex predators hunting them. He was so… 

He was ready to die to save the kids. He was right there with Alan.

He’s a good man.

And even before the crisis, before anything went wrong, he had just seemed so terribly  _ lonely. _ Talkative and flirtatious and  _ needy _ .

It’s the sort of thing that really bothered Alan, and bothers him still, because… Alan Grant isn’t a very sociable person. Only by some random act of mercy from the universe did Ellie Sattler fall in love with him. He doesn’t… he doesn’t deserve her, and he can see that, had things gone even a little bit differently, he would have been stuck with that same penetrating loneliness that he saw in Dr. Malcolm the day they met.

“Ian,” Ellie asks softly, “why haven’t you been sleeping?”

He freezes, like he doesn’t know how to answer. Like he isn’t used to being asked such a direct question - and why should he be? Who else is here to ask such a thing of him? “Um,” he says, ducking his eyes, “well, uh, I’ve stopped taking the, um, opioids, because… I don’t like, uh, being out of it. You know? I’m not… very big on drugs.”

Then Ellie gives him the look. Because she’s perceptive, intuitive to a  _ fault,  _ and she knows, even if Ian himself doesn’t know, that there is more to be said.

“And,” he continues, when she stares him down, “well, the pain makes it hard to fall asleep, but if I  _ do _ fall asleep, then I’m, uh. Prone to nightmares. I’d really rather just… not.”

Alan frowns. “Not sleep? You have to sleep at some point.” 

This, though, was the wrong thing to say. Ian’s looking at his knees, tapping his foot, and he frowns, setting his pizza down on the table. “Yeah,” he mumbles to himself, “yeah, yeah… you know, I really -” He kicks off with his good leg to roll into the kitchen, or maybe not into the kitchen but just away from Alan and Ellie. “I really don’t want you two to see me like this,” he says, laughing in self-deprecation, “you know,  _ pay no attention to the man behind the curtain _ …” 

“Ian,” Ellie interjects.

“You don’t,” he says, his voice agitated, “you don’t  _ owe _ me anything, you’ve, you’ve already saved my life, a few times over. So please don’t…” He shuts his mouth, licks his lips, stares at his knees. “I know I acted like this fun, sexy card when we all met, and I’d still - I’d love to take you guys out to dinner some time. But I can’t… right now. I’m. Not at my best.”

Ellie bites her lip. She looks at Alan,  _ say something _ .

“Ian,” he says, somewhat awkwardly. “You don’t… have to be at your best, around us. We get it.”

Their eyes meet. Alan notices Ian’s adam’s apple bob.

“You also don’t have to sleep alone,” Ellie blurts out, suddenly.

Not that they had discussed it. Not that they had even… considered the idea. 

“What?” says Ian, quietly, across the room. Sounds almost… hopeful.

Alan’s heart is in his throat and he looks at Ellie - she meets his gaze with an equally startled expression, like maybe she hadn’t meant to say it, but  _ oh _ she had. And her eyes are saying  _ Please don’t be jealous,  _ and Alan’s trying to communicate back to her  _ have you lost your mind? _

But he’s not… jealous. He knows, just by looking at her, that she meant  _ both of them,  _ in bed, with Ian, with  _ Dr. Malcolm,  _ and that… 

It doesn’t bother Alan, not as much as it probably should. In fact, it kind of… 

_ You’re really worried about him. _

...puts him at ease.

Ellie’s worry fades into a smile. She says, “We don’t…  _ have  _ to sleep in the guest room. You do have a pretty big bed.” 

They both turn to look at Ian, whose gaze is flitting back and forth between them. “Um,” he says, “You, uh, you don’t… I haven’t changed the sheets. It’s… difficult… and I’m… I’m sweaty, you don’t want to-” 

“You could shower,” Alan suggests, helpfully. “We could change the sheets.” 

“Um,” says Ian, and then he grins, tilting his head at them like he’s been left out of the joke but he’s trying to laugh along, “You two. You’re not… you’re not suggesting…?”

Alan’s never really thought about having someone else in bed with them. Alan doesn’t really think about sex very much, and even when he does, it never… he and Ellie spend so much time out in trailers on dig sites - no one else would  _ fit. _

That’s not as much of an issue here. Alan likes Ian well enough, and the bed is sizeable. But Ian still looks like a corpse on wheels, and Alan just needs to get him healthy again.

“We want you to feel safe,” Alan says. “You need sleep.”

“He’s right,” Ellie says. Alan feels her fingers on his shoulder. “What’s most important is that you feel comfortable. Everything else… it’s not off the table, but it can wait.”

It takes some time for Ian to respond. It’s like he’s studying them, calculating probabilities. He’s still tapping with one hand, and Alan notices that his hair is compressed on the right from having slept on his side. Ian’s gaze flits to the telephone. “I know how this looks,” he says. “Like. Like, um. Like I’ve been abandoned in my, uh, time of need. But that’s not… that’s not the situation. My, um. My exes. They do care. They give me too many chances. I’m - I’m unreliable, with the kids. I’m… inconsistent, and they, they were willing to come out here and help me with my leg, but I…” He frowns. “I couldn’t stand to make them take care of me, on top of everything else. I try to just, just, you know, stay out of it, because I’ve already, um. Um. Screwed up their lives, enough. The point is, I’m not, not really alone, you don’t need to… do all this.” 

Alan’s throat burns, and he looks to Ellie. She looks away, towards the wall. She removes her hand from Alan’s shoulder.

“Ian,” she says, carefully. “Please just go shower.”

Maybe he senses he’s said something wrong - he looks stricken.

Alan stands, fetches the crutches, and helps Ian out of the chair. Ian whispers, “I didn’t mean to - did I upset her? I didn’t - I’m sorry, I just wanted to explain-” 

“It’s alright,” Alan murmurs. He strokes a thumb down Ian’s shoulder, unconsciously. “You get cleaned up. We’ll bring in the bedding in a few minutes.”

But Ian spins around on one of the crutches. “I’m sorry, Dr. Sattler, if I’ve said something, um, offensive.” Eager desperation colors his tone.

Still on the couch, Ellie’s pinching the bridge of her nose, and Alan’s heart aches. “It’s fine, it’s not your fault. Give me a minute.” 

“Come on, give her space,” Alan whispers. Reluctantly, Ian enters the bedroom. “I’ll talk to her,” Alan promises, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry.” 

Ian nods. Focuses on his task. Lets Alan leave the room without much fuss.

 

Alan returns to the kitchen. Ellie found a beer in Ian’s fridge - she’s drinking it by the kitchen sink. 

“He’s good with kids,” Alan says. “You saw him, on Isla Nublar. He loves kids, loved joking around with Lex and Tim.”

“I know,” she says. She takes another sip, and on the swallow she asks, “Do you think that makes it worse?” 

“No.” 

“When we used to go visit my dad, and I was maybe… nine, we would get so excited and build it up in our heads, that he was this ideal father. But he didn’t know what to do with us. We ate fast food and watched cartoons in his basement.” She grimaces, and she gestures towards the door. “He’s good with kids, but he’s pulling away.”

“We don’t know the whole story, Ellie.” 

“I know he’s scared.” She sets the half-empty bottle on the countertop. “Dad was scared, too, and it kept him away from us until it was too late. I can’t forgive him that. I think - I think I need to go.”

Alan gets a hand on her arm. She lowers her shoulders with a sigh, and she lets him pull her close, between his arms. “You care about Ian.”

Her voice is muffled against Alan’s shoulder. “Not if he’s running away from his responsibility to his kids.” 

“He’s not,” Alan murmurs into her hair. “He knows his ex-wives have their hands full and he doesn’t want to burden them further with his injury; that’s what he was saying.”

“He said he stays out of their lives.” 

“Because he’s terrified of disappointing them. Just like he’s terrified of disappointing us. He’ll get over it, with time.” 

Alan gently strokes her back, pressing a kiss against the top of her hair. She takes a deep breath. “You’re… probably right.” When Ellie pulls away, her face is a bit pink, but she looks amused, and without warning she leans up to kiss his nose. 

“What was that for?”

She grins, a bit tiredly. “You always say you don’t understand people - look at you, Mister Insightful.”

He feels himself blush, and he looks away. “I understand a  _ few  _ people. Let’s, uh… the sheets are in the closet, let’s get them.”

He makes it all the way to the front doorway to open the linen closet before noticing Ellie is still in the kitchen. She’s watching him, fondly. When he turns to look at her, she leans over the kitchen island to rest her elbow, put her chin in the palm of her hand. 

“What?” he asks, smiling at her. 

“You’re really ready to do this?”

“Yes, of course.” 

She licks her lips. “I really love how much you care. Watching you today… you never care this much about anyone.”

He averts his eyes, the blush getting worse. He finds a set of grey sheets and pulls them out of the stack. As he shuts the closet door, he says, “There is… one other person I care about.”

She cocks an eyebrow, and he catches her in a kiss on the way to the master bedroom.

 

Ellie puts away the remaining pizza, and they both change into pyjamas and wash up in the kitchen sink. The bed is enormous, and makes the bedroom seem small, but Alan supposes it’s necessary given that otherwise Ian’s feet would hang off the end. The new sheets smell like the laundry detergent, something vaguely floral. Before Alan notices her moving, Ellie latches onto his back and tackles him to the bed. He feels her lips press behind his ear - “I love you,” she says. 

So they settle in. Ian’s crutches were abandoned by the closet, so when he emerges from the bathroom, he’s holding himself upright using the doorframe. His hair is still wet, dripping into the collar of a light blue Berkeley t-shirt. He looks… wary.

“I’m sorry for shutting down on you,” Ellie says softly from her place on the bed, smiling apologetically. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?” he counters, somewhat sourly. “You really don’t need to, um, do this. I… I appreciate it, but, you know. I’ve been told that I snore?” 

Alan pats the bed in between him and Ellie. “Come here. Do you need my help?” 

“No, I…” Ian frowns. “Alan… I don’t think I can… do this.”

Putting aside the fact that it’s the first time Ian’s said his first name (and how nice it sounded in his voice), Alan sits forward and says more insistently, “Come on, come on. We’re already here, you’re not gonna scare us away.” 

“Besides,” adds Ellie with a grin, “the bed’s too comfortable to leave.”

“I could take the couch,” Ian points out. Ellie rolls her eyes. Alan gets a hand on his bicep to tug him closer - “Okay, okay,” he says, and Alan is careful to help him into the bed without jostling his leg too much.

That’s when Ellie gasps. 

They’d seen the damage at the hospital, sure. And they’d seen a bit of the scarring from under Ian’s robe earlier, but… those were the surgery scars at the knee. Not like this. In the warm glow from the bedside lamp, they can see up his thigh and… 

“Oh my God.” Ellie breathes, “She got you. I never realized she actually…” 

Ian is stiffly settling against the pillows and the headboard. “Well, it didn’t break spontaneously on its own, if that’s what you were thinking.”

Puncture wounds, in an arc. They aren’t neat, dragging through the flesh, but they are clearly puncture wounds. Like the T-Rex had gotten his whole leg in her maw before… before what? 

“I had a, um. A knife. It was going to uh, shake me around to stun me, like, like a terrier with a rat. But not if you, uh, stun them first. With a knife. In the snout.” Ian lets out a harsh sigh, touching the wounds gingerly. “It would have kept, kept on me, I think. But then it found Gennaro, and…” 

“Jesus,” Alan breathes.

Ian’s trembling - maybe because of the cool air on his damp body, but more likely because of the topic, the memory of the trauma lingering...  Ellie shifts closer, her palm resting against the middle of his chest, her body against his side. She whispers to him, and Alan pulls the blankets over the three of them.

“Do you realize,” Ian asks, “how, how unlikely it is that… that I’m alive? Either they don’t get you, or they get you… those were the options. The chances of… there was no chance of surviving it once they got you. I was, very dead. I knew I was dead.”

“Chaos,” suggests Ellie, “everything is possible, right?”

“That’s not… this isn’t how that works. This is the opposite. I made a tourniquet - and it  _ worked _ \- and I saved my leg - and you found me before I bled out, and… the sheer volume of coincidental luck that led to my survival is… rather upsetting.”

“You don’t think it’s balanced out by the sheer volume of unlucky things that happened on the island?” Alan shifts closer too - he gets an arm around Ian’s shoulders, trying to give him that warmth, human contact to lean into. 

“No,” says Ian, and he glances up at Alan - their eyes meet, so close like this, and Alan sees the cloud of theories glazing over Ian’s eyes, “no, see, see, see  _ luck,  _ that’s not, that’s not my area. Luck doesn’t… favorable or unfavorable luck doesn’t make sense to me. I think in probabilities, and how the likelihood of chaos rises when you add complexity to an ordered system. But luck… luck is when the world chooses some tiny, fractional chance not once, but a series of times, consecutively. Like playing roulette, and the ball lands on seven,  _ four times in a row. _ ” 

“You’d make a lot of money,” Alan remarks, drily. 

“But it doesn’t - it doesn’t make  _ sense. _ Of course it’s possible, it’s always possible, but it just feels wrong. It feels ordered. It feels like the game is fixed.”

“When you lie awake at night,” says Ellie, “is that what you’re thinking about?”

Ian’s breath hitches - Alan can feel it, under his arm. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, a little. Part of it is the actual… the threat, the T-Rex. But part of it is definitely the… improbability of it all.”

Alan presses his mouth against Ian’s shoulder, the warmth of his body under the cotton fabric. “What’s the probability that something terrible happens tonight?” he asks softly, trying to sound neutral about it.

“Alan,” Ellie warns, “you’re making it worse.”

“No, I’m not. Ian, tell me the things that could go wrong tonight.” He finds Ian’s hand under the blankets, and interlocks their fingers. On the other side, Ellie does the same.

“Um,” Ian looks around the room slowly, scanning for threats. “The first possibility is… a fire. But I… I replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms, pretty recently.”

“We’ve shut the bedroom door,” Alan adds. “If the fire is outside the bedroom, that would buy us time. These windows -” he gestures to the window to the left of the bed, covered now by the drapes. “That’s, what, two stories? That’s a survivable drop. We could help you down from there.”

“Yeah,” Ian’s nodding, “yeah, you’re right. Plus, um. I keep a fireman’s axe in the bedroom closet.”

Alan and Ellie’s eyes meet, concerned, but neither of them say anything about it. “Right,” says Ellie, “okay, what else?”

“What else? Oh…” Ian relaxes, rests his head atop Alan’s at his shoulder. “Uhhh, an earthquake, probably. But this house is rated well for earthquakes. I, uh, made sure of that when I got it. In a region like this, you never… and typhoons, I guess, but this isn’t the season.”

“We could get nuked,” Alan supplies, because he remembers being a kid during the tail end of the cold war. “But that’s… that’s not the next in line of probabilities, is it?” 

“Maybe burglarized,” points out Ellie.

“No, no, there’s a security system.” He sighs, and leans back further against the pillows. “I don’t like this game. The, uh, the futility of it. Besides, who could really predict what disaster will strike? It didn’t work on the island. Coincidences.”

“That’s not the point of the game.” says Alan, softly. “The point is to remind you of all the precautions you’ve already taken. You wouldn’t be caught unawares.”

“After all,” whispers Ellie, “you brought a knife… you knew how to tie a tourniquet… I think you were pretty well prepared. That’s not serendipity, Ian, that’s strategy.”

“What else?” Alan prompts.

“What else…?” Ian hums tunelessly. “Maybe a landslide? Or a, a serial killer… maybe John airlifts a T-Rex to the streets of San Francisco…” Idly, he picks up Ellie’s hand where their fingers interlock, and he presses a kiss into her skin. “Worst of all,” he muses, “maybe I do something in the next few hours that, uh, royally screws up any chance I ever had with the two gorgeous paleontologists in my bed. Or worse, I wake up alone, and it was all a dream.”

So, naturally, Alan kisses him. Partly because, well, someone had to do it. Partly because Alan wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep without sucking on Ian’s plump bottom lip at least once - blame his monkey brain, he has urges. It’s mostly chaste - Alan doesn’t push for more, and when he pulls away from Ian with a wet sound, Ian’s eyes are bright, and wide. “Not a dream,” Alan whispers.

Ellie laughs into Ian’s side, getting out a muffled “Holy  _ smokes _ , you two are adorable.” 

“I- I- I- I…” Ian swallows, and smiles crookedly at Alan. “I don’t think I can fall asleep now.”

Alan rolls his eyes, fondly. He shuts off the bedside lamp, and the room is thrown into cool shadows but for the little nightlight in the bathroom. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, and he fits his body against Ian’s warmth, “you’ll figure it out.”

“Woah, wait, hold on, I want one!” says Ellie, and Alan snickers into the pillow as she steals a kiss from Ian as well - Ian makes a desperate noise. 

“Ellie, he’ll be up all night.” 

“Worth it,” she says proudly, and she settles down on his other side, in the dark.

“Wait,” Ian whispers hoarsely, “if I - I might wake up, in the middle of the night. I don’t want to… to wake you, that’s why we shouldn’t have…”

“If we wake up, we wake up,” Alan tells him. “It’s alright. You warned us and we made our decision anyway.” 

“If you’re hurting, I’d rather you wake me up anyway. I don’t want you to be alone with that,” Ellie whispers, and Alan hums agreement.

Ian shifts a bit to a comfortable position. “Okay,” he says softly, and then he says, “goodnight.” 

“Goodnight,” they respond, by his sides.

**Author's Note:**

> womp womp
> 
> my tumblr is [here](http://mitzvahmelting.tumblr.com)
> 
> thank you jurassic park discord


End file.
